Roll Back the Years by Rora ‘Hanah passed away today. Funeral Saturday.’ It was just a short telegram, but it took me back twenty-one years. That night I was on the all-night sleeper, headed south. Next morning I saw all the old familiar landmarks come into view, and I was filled with nostalgia. But my journey took me further on, to the place where my dear old relative was lying in state; for the next day or so, I was caught up in the ritual of a tangi and funeral, and met many dear folk that I had not seen for long years. We wept together as we remembered those dear ones who had passed on to the long sleep in Mother Earth, and we laughed together as we recalled many happy episodes of our youth. We talked about our families and our plans for them. We proudly counted our grand-children and discussed their names, and noted the modern tendency to dispense with the old family names (ingoa tupuna) in favour of European names; where the old names were called upon the children, we lovingly recalled the long-dead ones who had once borne these names. After the funeral was over we went around looking at other graves in the cemetery, and I marvelled at our almost universal neglect of our dead; there were some fine monuments rearing up out of fern and blackberry, discoloured now by the ravages of time, and others had grass and fern growing out of cracks and crevices. I wondered what would be the feeling of those souls, when they came forth at the command of Jesus, in that great day of His coming, and saw their neglected resting places. Then we left the cemetery and returned to the Pa, and after eating a meal we sat around on the Marae listening to the speeches and farewells of those who were making an immediate departure. Then, in company with my older sister and our brother and his wife, I left for a nearby city where I was to spend the night; and as we drove away from the Marae, I expressed my overwhelming desire to see again the home of our childhood, and looking with tears at the hills twenty miles off where our old home lay. So we travelled down that old road of my youth and saw again many of the homes I knew so well. Some sported a new coat of paint; many had new additions and new owners; some had disappeared, and were marked only by a few forlorn fruit trees and hedges. There was the old school, now acting as a hall, and there was the old home with the blue hydrangeas where the Infant Mistress always boarded; there was the old stream, flow-gently over the flat, in and out through the native trees—the same old stream where we had followed our mother as children dragging a flax line for eels. And so we travelled on, and the sun slipped down behind the hills, and dusk settled over the peaceful scenes. There was the old cream stop where we used to take our cream by gig, and I remembered how we used to play along the side planks of the old wooden bridge, now replaced by a wide concrete one. How I loved the bridges, and the thump, thump, thump, of the horses as they hurried across, for no matter how often a horse crosses a bridge, he never really trusts it. Then we came to the turnoff, where the lady of the house had kept Post Office, a tiny room